Source.—Henry of Huntingdon, Epistola de Contemptu Mundi, ed. Arnold, p. 299. (Rolls Series.)

Experience of evil is a fatal hook to catch at men’s hearts and enslave them to riches and transitory pleasures. This I have learned from my own life. For when I was a child, a boy and a young man, I used to see the glory of Robert, our bishop, his gallant knights, his noble pages, his costly horses, his vessels of gold and silver gilt, his store of plate, his gorgeous waiting-men, his purple robes and fine linen, and I thought there could be no happier condition. And when all men, even they who lectured in the schools on the vanity of the world, were obsequious to him, and he himself, honoured as the father and god of all, loved and valued the world overmuch, with what countenance, with what temper would I have regarded any man who should have told me then that this splendour, which all admired, was contemptible? I would have judged him more mad than Orestes, more querulous than Thersites. I thought there could be no flaw in the exalted happiness of so exalted a man. But when I became a man, I heard stories of the vilest abuse being levelled at him, and felt that I would have fainted if the same words had been spoken to me, who possess nothing, before the same high audience. I began therefore to deem of less account that inestimable happiness.

But since many worldly folk commonly experience the bitterest reverses before their death, I will relate what befel him before his end. He who had been justiciar of the whole of England and greatly feared by all men, was twice impleaded by the king at the end of his life before a justice of low birth, and twice condemned with disgrace in the heaviest damages; whereby his anguish of heart so affected him, that when I, now his archdeacon, sat by him at dinner, I saw that he had been moved to tears. I asked the cause, and he replied, “At one time my attendants were sumptuously clothed; now the fines exacted by the king, whose favour I have always sought, have reduced them to sheepskins.” After this his despair of winning the king’s friendship was so great that when the high praise lavished on him by the king in his absence was reported to him, he said with a sigh, “The king only praises a subject whom he has determined utterly to ruin.” For king Henry, if one may dare to say so, exercised consummate duplicity and possessed an inscrutable mind. A few days afterwards, at Woodstock, where the king had appointed a hunt, while conversing with the king and the bishop of Salisbury, who were the highest in the kingdom, our bishop was struck with apoplexy. Alive, but speechless, he was carried into his house, and soon afterwards died in the king’s presence. The great king, whom he had always served, whom he had loved much and feared much, whom he held in such honour, whom he trusted so entirely, no more availed him in his last necessity than a beggar. Note therefore that it was not said in vain, “Cursed be he that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm.” When therefore the child or the boy or the young man regards the prosperous, let him take thought of the uncertainty of their end, and remember that even in this world they may be doomed to suffer a decline full of misery. Bishop Robert was gentle and humble, advancing many and crushing none, the father of orphans, beloved by his household; yet this was the end of him.